We’ve arrived at the sad, dumb point in history at which the only thing less surprising than acts of mass violence are the ways in which our planet’s mega information distributors muck everything up with ensuing frauds, hoaxes, and confusion. The problem is thoroughly identified: Facebook, Google, and, to a lesser extent, Twitter have the quality control of a yard sale and the scale of 100,000 Walmarts. But despite all our railing and shaming, these companies have a major disincentive to reform: money.

In the wake of yet another American massacre, this time in Las Vegas, media scrutiny is aimed once more at Facebook, Google, and Twitter, for the same old reasons. The sites, time after time, and this time once more, served up algorithmic links to websites peddling deliberate lies and bottom-feeder misinformation. These companies provided an untold mass of online users with falsehoods posing as news resources, as is completely normal now and only noteworthy because it was pegged to a heinous national tragedy. The discussion will now swing from “This is bad” to “What can be done?”, and we can expect all the typically empty pro forma reassurance from Silicon Valley public relations offices. Don’t expect much more.

This email from Google I just got is insane. They talk about 4Chan as if it is a news source. Third bullet point: pic.twitter.com/qgpXIg7JQB

It’s extremely important to keep Fox News in mind these days. The network is essentially a less sophisticated delivery vehicle for the same sort of news that floats to the top of Facebook and other sites’ traffic: Insincere men barking half-truths and innuendos in order to piss people off. Facebook’s brilliant tweak to this formula was the realization that 1. You don’t need to pay your own team of Bad-Faith Freakout Men; there are plenty in the wild who will do it for free, and 2. Millions of people will take the opportunity to make their peers equally pissed off if given a button to press. The business is the same, though: Piqued emotion is a powerful commodity. It would seem ridiculous to ask Fox News why it doesn’t reform its portrayal of black children as animals and criminals, of Muslims as savages and bombers, and so forth. It’s obvious why they wouldn’t, because these portrayals are their stock-in-trade, and what company would put itself out of business? We find ourselves at a similar impasse with Facebook and friends.

There are a few numbers these companies live and die by. One of these numbers is the quantification of “engagement,” a term kept deliberately vague so it can be expanded more easily; it essentially translates to “things happening on the website.” For Twitter, this means tweets, retweets, favorites, and various other clicking activities. “More” is directly equivalent to “better for business,” no matter what exactly there is more of. For Facebook, this translates to writing posts, sharing posts, liking posts, and so forth. The more people are staring at Facebook or clicking its click-ables, the higher this engagement number goes, and the better the company looks to investors and advertisers, the two parties that determine whether an internet firm will be massively lucrative or dead. Google’s position here is slightly different in that individual user accounts matter less, but the gist is similar: The more people looking and clicking, the better. You only need to spend several minutes on the internet to realize that a lot of this looking and clicking includes things like racist witch hunts, white supremacist evangelizing, deliberate hoaxes, and maybe even electoral interference of some sort (it seems entirely plausible that foreign governments might take to Facebook to throw wrenches in our civic life because they know we love wrenches). For years now, the major internet information brokers have been promising and promising to improve, but delivering only the most marginal signs of improvement. This isn’t a sign of failure but of lack of effort. We have yet to see what it would look like for a major technology company to make a serious, concerted attempt to filter out deliberate acts of harm and deceit.

The notion that Twitter couldn’t curb spam bots and Nazis or that Google couldn’t blacklist 4chan from its news overview is absurd. The issue is that, for revenue purposes, engagement with the informational equivalent of a leaking septic tank is indistinguishable from engagement with news sources that aren’t explicitly trying to deceive and defraud readers. The political Facebook ads that were allegedly purchased by the Russian government went into the same money vault as ads from Nike and Pepsi, and rape-threat tweets count just as much on Twitter’s quarterly earnings calls as announcements from NASA and Denny’s. The increasingly toxic internet is working as designed by the companies that control most of it — corporate monoliths that hold the primary channels of digital information distribution and obligations to shareholders, not civil society.

There is, too, the problem that we just seem to enjoy being lied to and delight in abusing one another. Hoax posts and sketchy sites get traffic not just from fraud bots, but also from eager readers who care much more about tribalism and score-settling than about accuracy. Clearly, the status quo is awful, if not untenable. But there are a few obvious remedies; a tech colossus like Facebook is, as Max Read wrote in a fantastic account for New York magazine, something that transcends categorization, and few people, in the U.S. at least, want the government legislating what’s considered true or newsworthy. It may be that in the near future society decides that no company should have the capacity for distribution that Google, Facebook, and to a much lesser extent Twitter all possess (Twitter’s board no doubt wishes its engagement metrics were high enough to be a legitimate threat to civilization). Maybe the governments and regulatory bodies of the world will decide that no company, least of all Facebook, should be able to contact two billion people at once if it so chose, and break it into smaller, tamer pieces. Until then, at the very least, stop expecting these companies to move anywhere beyond the shortest distance achievable with dragged feet. There’s simply too much money to be made right now in the muck.

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AI and machine learning is in its infancy still and can be used very efficiently. Social manipulation is an old art that has a very powerful new ally in the form of algorithms. Sites want more traffic to their pages and thus its simple to find the triggers needed to make this happen.

The use of combining the platforms to trigger trending topics flows on to social listening and that scales up as other writers engage with the same rhetoric and headlines they see trending. Dynamic Keyword headlines that update based on traffic results are just the start of this.

Asking the machine learning of these companies to detect this is simply way beyond the capabilities of the AI’s at this stage. Human nature needs to be able to learn to drive on the new super hwys of disinformation. Its a shame that it took a major election to expose the need to disabuse.

Google, Facebook, and Twitter aren’t journalistic enterprises and should not be treated as such. They should have no burden re: the public being properly informed–that burden should only and ever be on the public itself. The public who lets themselves believe lies found on those sites, or The Washington Post, or Fox News, is deluded. But should be allowed to remain so.

Also, this is maybe something Mr. Biddle might like to read… There already has been a successful quashing of “fake news” on Google. And no slippery slope needed–it already and first cracked down on supposed Russian-stooge sites (i.e. independent media not aligned with the MSM’s Putin Derangement Syndrome).

And much of Alternet abandoned its sanity for awhile and has also fallen in with the crazed Trump-Russia nonsense. But this is still a good and instructive read:

“We have had consistent search traffic averaging 2.7 million unique visitors a month, over the past two and a half years. (Search traffic makes up 30-40 percent of AlterNet’s overall traffic.) But since the June Google announcement, AlterNet’s search traffic has plummeted by 40 percent—a loss of an average of 1.2 million people every month who are no longer reading AlterNet stories.

AlterNet is not alone. Dozens of progressive and radical websites have reported marked declines in their traffic. But AlterNet ranks at the top in terms of audience loss because we have a deep archive from 20 years of producing thousands of news articles. And we get substantial traffic overall—typically among the top five indy sites.”

Sounds like you approve of this and want more of it, Mr. Biddle? You want self-policing of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, even if such leads to absurdity and the death of any non-mainstream thought? Is that correct, Mr. Biddle? You want more private suffocation of speech? You want any and all sites that try to warn us of a flawed US government or MSM claim to go away?

You would’ve been helpful in 2002, if Google had the audacity then to allow searches to find sites warning against flawed US intel and the US Government and MSM’s irrational and evidenceless desire to go to war with Iraq. Guess that should’ve been shut down too. A certain sort of opinion or information should simply never be allowed to reach the public.

“Back in September 2016 Reuters ran an article declaring that the First Draft Coalition , including Google, Facebook, Twitter, New York Times, Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Agence France-Presse and CNN intended to launch an effort to combat fake news . A shadowy outfit calling itself PropOrNot surfaced in November 2016 with an anonymously compiled list of 199 sites it said “reliably echo Russian propaganda.” More than half the sites were right wing nutjobs, from the nazis at StormFront to the libertarians at the Ron Paul Institute. But about twenty or so were entirely credible sources of news and information to the left of mainstream Democrats, including DemocracyNow! the World Socialist Web Site , Alternet , Naked Capitalism , Counterpunch , TruthOut! and Black Agenda Report. It’s worth noting that Black Agenda Report is the ONLY site owned and run by black people and aimed at an African American audience to be singled out in this manner.”

A lot of opinions here but I don’t see much in the way of empirical evidence. Google has been systematically working on this problem for several years now. Cretins showing up as a top ranked page was just the most recent black eye. But are they the first hit still? Or are you bending the facts to fit a flawed narrative that is totally counterfactual.

Currently, google is targeting YMYL pages so that they don’t appear to be overly partisan. Why don’t you compare cancer, the trending super food of the day (jojoba?) or vaccine search results on Google today with what turned up 2 years ago. Political pages you disagree with- and may even consider fake- will still be featured. Actual fake news will be snuffed out.

Im 5 years all the top search results will fall in their E.A.T. Guidelines. Fake news is objectionable on every level. But bitter screeds about 4chan are neither germane nor informative. The idea that ravings of idiots will continue to. E featured content on google because somehow this makes more money than highly profitable, reputable and well run websites is patently false. Foolish fake news costs them money. Maybe that is why they are stamping it out.

We live in a world that has steadily and perhaps even systematically elevated economic performance, profit, over human value.

This has further been codified into education; all/most business education is currently premised on “profit is the only morality” (thank you Mr. Friedman), and economic regulations; take your pick… It is structural. Any enterprise that tries to value the society in which they live and operate is put to disadvantage against those that legally, and apparently socially acceptably, don’t.

So much easier to go with the flow, don’t rock the boat, etc… Except that following this path, eventually you go extinct, perhaps like a virus killing off its host. And before that of course, you go insane. Barking mad. Our richest ceos are already eating their own young. After all, fossil-fuel execs have children and grand-children too. Internal Exxon documents for example, show that the company was well aware of the effect of using fossil-fuels on global warming/climate change decades ago. Their response was to undertake a decades long misinformation, that is, propaganda, “fake news,” etc., campaign in order to derail any unified support for reigning in or phasing out fossil fuels and greening up. I guess most of these ceos don’t expect to be alive much after 2030 or so, so here’s just a big “Screw you!” to everyone else. Including of course, their own children.

And yet, these are the very persons, all those of this same ilk and their political lackeys, who are aggressively setting this agenda for all of us and, of course, taking full advantage of the current social media model which treats it’s users as a mere commodity to be exploited… however possible. Undoubtedly, there are many people in these enterprises whose job it is to do exactly that, figure out new ways to commodify and monetize their users, for profit.

What if your value as an individual was recognized and upheld by society in general, and government, and by law..? Actually, you would think that’s what the Constitution is for. But, it’s only paper if it’s not valued and upheld by society itself. Regardless, unconsciously or not, we are continually choosing what kind of society that we are living in.

Personally, I would much rather pay a nominal yearly fee for a “facebook” type service in return for not harvesting and selling my data, nor serving as an interface for presenting me to advertisers.

I am quite sympathetic to the views of this article but the level he is highlighting, I think, is way toward the top of the tree while the problem is in the roots and soil in which they grow.

How about, instead of passively accepting the authoritarian status quo, or “paying a nominal yearly fee for a facebook type service”, we stop demanding giant entities supply our market demands. Instead of depending on Wizards of Oz in far-flung Emerald Cities, we decide to create a culture/tradition of self-determination, and place all our chips on it. By placing all of our value on self-determination, we move from a system of authoritarianism to a system of anarchism. In anarchism, the more life-serving any element, the more it resonates with other life-serving elements. The more positivity we practice, the more positive momentum we create, and it feeds on itself in a virtuous circle. This enables us to see the difference much more clearly between the results of our two basic choices (authoritarianism & anarchism). A radical personal policy to keep one’s choices 100% positive keeps everything simple and clear, so the backsliding into authoritarianism is far less of a risk. The anarchian society builds naturally out of this when enough people move to practicing anarchism. The alternative is unacceptable, if we want to reach our potential.

So let me get this straight: a Buzzfeed “reporter” (used in the loosest sense of the word) types the name of a person who has never appeared in the public sphere previously and wonders why the results are full of fringe sites? What does he want to happen instead? Does he want Google to instantly disconnect his internet connection with a flashing sign on his screen “Thought Criminal!”?

Can we remove Buzzfeed from google news listing while we are at it? And to think a mere 100 000 votes across Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania is what has brought us all this junk journalistic scare campaigns about Fake News.

So you’re telling me that big companies make money out of morally dubious practises and won’t stop?!

On a more serious note though, I’m not sure whether there’s some kind of meta levelling going on with this article, but you do realize that this format of writing you’re using is the exact same you just used multiple hundred words to criticize? No data, no metrics, poorly researched and sourced- one could almost say you’re “barking half-truths”?

Don’t get me wrong, it’d most certainly be something worth investigating- how much traffic misinformation generates on these sites you mentioned- but this effort doesn’t even qualify as an opinion piece.

Let’s be very clear who this also benefits: The Intercept. Greenwald has no qualms pushing fake academic studies – that is to say, not edited, peer reviewed, or published in any way – and point to it as compelling data, while continuing to attempt to call into question any reporting on Russia-Trump by pointing to a few isolated cases. There’s a reason Greenwald does very well on twitter – because he has, as you point out, thousands of fans to parrot his stupidity.

The Intercept’s failure to have standards of attribution for claims, to fact check its articles, to let its columnists pass off bogus information, puts a lie to the claim of rigorous and adversarial journalism.

Also would add that “eager readers who care much more about tribalism and score-settling than about accuracy” seems to me an incredibly apt description of the core of The Intercept’s readership, at least judging by the comments.

I’m a believer in assuming good faith, so I was wondering if you could point me to these fake academic studies that Greenwald has supposedly linked, as well as their failure to attribute claims?

I disagree with your characterization of Greenwald’s Russia stance. From what I understand from his statements he doesn’t want to base his assumptions on secret evidence from intelligence organizations who have a history of lying and falsifying information, and is understandably tired of having people imply he’s a Russian traitor every single day on Twitter. He’s repeatedly said that he supports an independent investigation and whatever comes afterward so long as the evidence is made public.

By ‘misinformation’, Mr. Biddle means humans communicating with each other. Preventing humans from communicating with each other is a noble goal, but hard to achieve. People have always gathered together to gossip and spread lies.

While this can’t be stopped, it can be curtailed. For example,Twitter can be replaced with Instagram. Words can be replaced with pictures. The root problem is language – human language has evolved to facilitate telling lies. Pictures don’t lie. So if we can eliminate language and replace it with a pictorial means of communication, then we’ve made major progress.

Twitter won’t go down without a struggle. It is proposing to increase the length of a tweet from 140 to 280 characters. This is a step in the wrong direction; people will be able to cram twice as many lies into every tweet. Congress needs to pass a law reducing the length of Tweets, say (as a first step) from 140 to 70 characters. In fact, if Congress were to outlaw English (and every other language), and mandate that people only communicate using emoticons, Fake News would virtually disappear. However, no one enjoys telling lies more than congressional representatives, so I’m under no illusion that this will ever happen.

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods

This article is long on complaints and completely devoid on solutions. The filter bubbles are are all trapped in on social media are problematic, but censorship is definitely not the solution, and yet it’s the only thing Biddle seems to suggest, other than breaking Facebook up into “smaller pieces.” But that has no meaning anyway. The problem isn’t Facebook, itself, sending out the occasional message to 2 billion people all at once (as he suggests). The problem, rather, is the algorithms designed to maximize engagement, which lock us all into filter bubbles, combined with our own tendency to want to define our social identity through posts and comments that reflect our perceived tribe.

This is a complicated issue and cannot be boiled down to “evil social media companies.” Changing the algorithms to bring back the online commons is one partial solution, and the rest requires us to look inside ourselves.

well said, in fact so well said I wish there was a social media style “like” button (insert emojis). The filter bubbles and the lack of critical reading and thinking skills are the problems. Fake news wouldn’t be such a problem if it wasn’t the only news and if people read these stories with a critical eye rather than simply believing most of what is fed to them.

The “filter bubble” is another problem. It is polarizing the US into “us” vs “them.” There is little to no room left for discourse or god forbid…compromise.

What a mind job, trying to present profit hungry immoral bastards, enablers of the social disruption, not harmony, as they falsely claims ,using their Orwellian newspeak.

Is it too much to figure out by brainwashed unwashed American sheeple that the so called “fake news ” is a pillar of FB and Google business model and asking them to stop proliferating it equals to their corporate death and repudiation of what they deeply believe i.e. “To be Evil very Evil for Money”.

Yes, if it was “the Pope” who was shooting in Las Vegas Goggle would have had 100 times more searches and hence its ad rates would have skyrocketed. The is same in FB, more bizarre, more shocking crap to spread more traffic more people who long gave up on FB BS would log in and join the fray of news junkies craving the food for empty thought FB and Google are here to serve.

And recent attempt for straight impudent communist style censorship is nothing but appalling, revealing true Orwellian attitude of the FB, Google oligarchs, immoral bastards, allowing for Kim Kardashian fake butt “fake news” to spread like a wildfire making her $100 millions in a election year, while justified well documented political criticism, after first absolutely and sanely denying it, now becoming a real and present threat to life and liberty in the US only because some FB/Goggle oligarchic butts have been whipped off camera by CIA. Tweeter seemed to resist it, take the pain.

It is the very business model of Evil of trafficking in human souls and their fragility what is the problem. It is more shocks, more crises, more spectacular visual pain and suffering, more horrible disasters, disturbances or torment of people’s lives that is the Social Media fodder happily selling a “Soylent Green” made out of fellow FB and Google mental zombies.

How to stop it? How to stop propaganda of chaos, war, hatred and mass commercial exploitation of cultures and peoples and all the permeating fear when all of the Evil brings so much corporate profit, unheard of in the history of civilization while “All Mighty” is nowhere to be found to punish the oligarchic wanton?

Hence it is up to us to make sure that corporate oligarch’s class is eradicated without prejudice since it is a scorch of the earth and parasite of human civilization and fierce enemy of social harmony.

Facebook and Twitter are social media outlets, which content is dependent on users’ posting. The idea THEY spread anything is an outright lie, and a gross misunderstanding of how they function. Google is a commercial search engine, with an advertisement business model. That means that part of its algorithms include the possibility for other economic bodies to buy search results position.

The idea that the three “help spread disinformation”, if intended as implying that they take active part in the dissemination of information others post (Facebook, Twitter) or buy (Google) is itself (a true) disinformation, or hard-to-believe ignorance.